Understanding Inerrancy – Part 8
1 Peter 1:10–12
Opening
Prayer
“Father,
we’re thankful for this opportunity to come together as a body of believers to
study Your Word. Father, we trust in Your Word. We trust that Your Word
accurately and precisely defines who You are and Your plan for salvation.
Everything in Your Word is accurate as You revealed it in the original
languages.
As we
study we come to understand the truth that is there and it shapes our thinking,
our worldview, and the way in which we live.
Father,
only through God the Holy Spirit can we live the Christian life in the Church
Age. We pray we might be focused on our diligent, consistent walk by the
Spirit.
Father, we
pray You would open our eyes to the truth of Scripture this evening that we
might come to understand these things more clearly and our confidence will
increase.
Father, we
also pray for those in the congregation who at this time are without jobs and
without income and the uncertainty that they face. Father, we pray for this time
as they’re tested that You would encourage them and that the body of Christ
might come together around them to pray for them and to help them as they can.
Father, we
pray for so many in the Houston area who face the same situation with the
downturn in the economy and we pray that especially in terms of the nation that
as we face this election season things might tend to change and improve but we
know we go through these cycles just as we do in life.
These
tests are designed to strengthen our faith that we might have joy not based on
our circumstances but based on our relationship with You. We pray these things
in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Let’s
begin with turning to Matthew 27 while I give you a little review. As I’ve said
in almost the beginning of each session that we’re studying in 1 Peter. That’s
why this is part of the 1 Peter series.
We have
reverted to a doctrine, The Doctrine of Inspiration and Inerrancy of Scripture,
because 1 Peter 1:10–12 talks about this process in the Old Testament. A lot of
people don’t understand it.
This is
periodic. Every twenty or thirty years we have to go through another battle for
the Bible again. This is raging throughout the conservative seminaries. Not
Chafer. Not Tyndale. I think there’s a free grace seminary in Georgia and it’s
not there.
It’s in a
number of other places. The root of this is because back in the 1970s these
young hotshot scholars, mostly baby boomers, got in their heads that they
wanted to be a scholar like all the other scholars. It’s sort of like we’ve
been studying on Tuesday night when the Jews wanted to have a king like all the
other nations.
These
scholars wanted to be scholars like all the other scholars. They wanted to have
the respect of the Harvards, the Princetons, the Oxfords, Edinburg, Basil, and
etc. They went off to these schools and became infected. In a lot of cases it
was to a small degree but it was still a viral infection that affected their
view of Scripture.
They picked
up ideas here and there that may have sounded good at the time but they have
come to characterize their thinking. Even though they may have only run to the
edge of the field and they’re just running along the “out-of-bounds lines” but
they didn’t cross over.
Or maybe
they crossed over just an inch but their students are crossing over feet and
yards outside the bounds. In the last couple of generations since the 70s we’ve
seen some real shifts take place in some places that are traditionally thought to
affirm biblical inerrancy and infallibility.
We looked
at this definition. I know some people in the congregation have memorized this.
“God the Holy Spirit so supernaturally directed the human writers of Scripture,
that without waiving their human intelligence, vocabulary, individuality,
literary style, personality, personal feelings, or any other human factor, His
complete and coherent message to mankind was recorded with perfect accuracy in
the original languages of Scripture, the very words bearing the authority of
divine authorship.”
This is a
fundamental definition. One of the challenges that comes from those that reject
traditional inerrancy is the term that they use, limited inerrancy. Basically
what that means is the same old position that has been espoused by those that
reject the total authority of Scripture is that the Word of God is
authoritative in all matters of faith and practice.
As long as
the Bible is talking about the spiritual life or Jesus’ work on the Cross or
salvation, then it’s accurate and inerrant. But when it talks about science or
history or geography or some other things in those areas, then it’s not
inerrant. There are mistakes.
The
question is how do you decide what are mistakes or not? This permeates a lot of
thinking. In a lot of ways this is very, very subtle. The Scripture tells us
that God is the author of Scripture. One of the critiques that has been made by
a scholar by the name of William Lane Craig, a well-known apologist philosopher
and theologian, is that inerrancy is just based upon deduction.
Deductive
logic, which is a problem for some theologians and some pastors, is not the
source of the doctrine of inerrancy.
We studied
this. I talked about passages like 2 Timothy 3:16–17. These passages clearly
teach that. The deduction is derived from conclusions that are arrived at
through induction. The Scripture says that God is the source of Scripture. God
breathed it out.
Scriptures
also teach that God is true. Therefore, Scripture is true. We went through that
deduction.
The major
premise and the minor premise in that syllogism were derived deductively from
Scripture. So Craig’s of an argument and the argument of some who say this is
just a theological deduction that is imposed on Scripture is fallacious.
Scripture
is breathed out by God, which is what we understand as inspiration. This is the
first part of this three-legged stool illustration I’ve given you. All biblical
truth, Christian belief, everything we believe is grounded upon the authority
of the Word of God.
That is a
three-legged stool which emphasizes the origin of the Bible. Infallibility
which emphasizes the authority of the Bible and inerrancy which describes the
accuracy of the Bible.
We’ve
looked at these slides each time. Inspiration emphasizes origin of the Bible.
Infallibility authority and the enduring nature of the Bible. Inerrancy, the
accuracy of the Bible
What we’ve
done last time is to look at some of the alleged contradictions which we find
in the Old Testament. We went through those and I started off, if you remember,
talking about the methodology that a right thing done in a wrong way is wrong.
So you
have the study of the Bible and that’s the right thing. But if you study the
Bible the wrong way, in other words if you adopt a wrong methodology, you’re
going to arrive at wrong conclusions. Those wrong conclusions are going to
eventually attack and destroy what you’re trying to protect, which is biblical
truth.
We have to
affirm the truth of Scripture and how we handle the text which is through a
method of interpretation which is substantiated through looking at how the
Bible interprets itself which is a plain, normal interpretation of Scripture.
It assigns normal modes of language and expression and communication to the
language of Scripture.
That is
called historical, grammatical interpretation of Scripture.
The
historical part of that term is emphasizing that we understand how the Bible
uses these words and phrases within the framework of its history at the time in
which it was written. Grammar shapes the meaning of language. So in that sense
we view history as that which is objective and knowable and that we can have an
accurate, though not an exhaustive knowledge of history. That is our
presupposition.
Grammar is
that language conveys meaning and that meaning ultimately resides in the mind
of the author and the intent of the author and it is not determined by the mind
of the receiver, the person who hears the Bible. Or the person who reads the
Bible does not assign his own meaning to the text.
That’s not
something new but it has been developed tremendously in the last 100 years
through the philosophy of post-modernism. It is really built on Kantian
philosophy that we can’t know things as they are. We can only know things as we
perceive them.
Immanuel
Kant put forth his philosophy in his book “The Critique of Pure Reason” which
came out about the same time as the American War for Independence, 1776. It
quickly spread through the ranks of the intelligentsia in Europe and began to
shape the philosophical thinking of the early 19th century
professors and elites. It impacted how they understood history, how they
understood truth, how they understood knowledge, and the Bible.
Historical
criticism is an outgrowth of that. I’ll talk a little bit about it as we go
through the lesson tonight.
What I
want to start with tonight is talking about these alleged problems in the New
Testament. I talked about the Old Testament last time so I’ll talk about the
New Testament this time.
I want to
start with a situation that is current. You can go out on the Internet, I
understand, and watch some videos on this and you can read about it. You can
Google just a couple of names I’ll give you in a minute and you can read more
than you ever wanted to know about some of these issues. This is a huge issue
going on right now in New Testament scholarship.
I read to
you much of the article Bob Wilkin wrote, “Can
we Still Trust New Testament Professors?” That’s just the tip of the
iceberg that is floating around in modern evangelical scholarship.
The
passage at issue here is Matthew 27:51–54. You might want to turn in your
Bibles there. Matthew 27 describes the arrest of Jesus. It describes the trials
and the crucifixion of Jesus and His burial, as well. Then the resurrection
doesn’t occur until the next chapter.
What we
read in Matthew 27:51 and following are part of the story. This is one of those
episodes only told in Matthew that a lot of people aren’t familiar with unless
they’ve read their Bible. Matthew inserts this right after Jesus dies in
Matthew 27:50.
I want to
go back to Matthew 27:45 and I want to read the context to you. The way we read
this context is that it is talking about history. It’s describing events that
occurred in space-time history on a specific day, just before sundown, the
Passover Day in Israel. Just before Passover came at sundown.
“From the sixth
hour until the ninth hour [twelve noon to 3 PM], there was darkness over all the land.”
That’s describing specific events. You have a chronological note there from the
sixth hour until the ninth hour. You can’t say, “Well, that could have been
from 6:00 AM to 9:00 AM. No, you have to understand that historically this is
on a Jewish clock which begins at sunrise. “From the sixth hour until the ninth
house there was darkness over all the land.”
“At about the ninth
hour Jesus cries out with a loud voice saying, ‘Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?’ My
God, My God, Why have You forsaken Me?” Did Jesus actually say that or not?
It is presented by Matthew as an historical record of exactly what was going
on.
“Some of those who
stood there when they heard that said that this man is calling for Elijah.
Immediately one of them ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine and put
it on a reed, and gave it to Him to drink.”
Matthew
27:49, “The rest
said, ‘Let Him alone, let us see if Elijah will come to save Him.’ ”
Verse 50, “Jesus cried out
again with a loud voice and yielded up His spirit.”
Now we get
to the passage. When Jesus died physically [verse 51] “Then behold the veil of the temple was torn
in two from top to bottom: and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split.”
This isn’t
describing these events in order but it is describing what happens after Jesus
died. It’s just listing the different things that happened. “The veil of the
temple was torn in two from top to bottom: and the earth quaked, and the rocks
were split. And the graves were opened: and many bodies of the saints who had
fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the graves after His resurrection,
they went into the holy city and appeared to many.”
If you
read this in the Greek, it is a listing—this and this and this and this and
this. There is no appearance of any kind of break in the description of the
different things that happened following Jesus’ death.
The thing
that we’re focused on is what occurs in verses 52 and 53. “The graves were opened and many bodies of
the saints [the semicolon really isn’t there] who had fallen asleep were raised, and
coming out of the graves …” Then we have the time frame there that it was
after His resurrection. They went into the holy city and appeared to many.
What
happened in 2011 was a scholar by the name of Michael Licona wrote a book, an
extremely long book, some 700 + pages that was on the resurrection. He
published this 718-page tome [“The Resurrection of Jesus; A New
Historiographical Approach”] to defend the physical, bodily resurrection of
Christ. Most of what he said was accurate and true and he did a very good job
from what the reviews say about defending the physical, bodily resurrection of
Christ.
But in a
number of places he questions the historicity of certain things that are in the
account of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. One of those is this event
in Matthew 27. He calls this a “strange little text”. He claims that this is
parallel to Greco-Roman biographies [bios] that use “phenomenal language in a
symbolic manner”.
In other
words what he is saying is a very popular trend now among evangelical New
Testament scholars. They say that in order to solve what they think are
contradictions in the text and contradictions between the different gospel
accounts you have to look at the standards for biography at that time which
were not the same as today.
In the
standards today you have to footnote everything and everything is given with
precise reference, but at that time when you look at “Plutarch’s Lives” and you
look at others, they embellished accounts. They included a lot of legend and
myth so you have to sift through it. They don’t have this rigid standard of accuracy
which we have in modern times.
He’s using
this standard of the world to be his guide for the writing of biography. He
also says that this is poetry. It’s poetic. He says it’s legend and it includes
special effects. Here are some of the statements he makes in the book: pages
562–563, “It seems to me that an understanding of the language in Matthew
27:52–53 as special effects with eschatological Jewish texts and thought in
mind is most plausible.”
What he’s
doing is he’s using these extra-biblical Jewish texts to form a standard just
as he used the Greco-Roman biographies to form a standard and he’s using that
to evaluate Scripture.
Now hold
that thought. Pause. In 1983 a man by the name of Robert Gundry was kicked out
of the Evangelical Theological Society. This was a huge thing. Gundry had
written a commentary on Matthew in the late 70s or right around 1980 in which
he said that in order to clear up these apparent contradictions in the gospel
you had to understand that Matthew was writing according to Jewish “Midrash”
and so Gundry was removed. His membership was canceled and he was voted out of
the Evangelical Theological Society. It was a big scandal among evangelical
scholars at the time.
Basically
what Michael Licona is doing is the same kind of thing.
I don’t
think I gave you background on Michael Licona. He formerly taught on the
faculty at Southeastern Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina which
was a seminary founded by Norm Geisler. Dr. Geisler was on the faculty at
Dallas when I was a student back in the late 70s. He is well known. He’s a
writing machine. I’d say he’s probably written over 75 or 100 books and he’s
written I don’t know how many articles. The guy is phenomenal. He has a couple
of different doctorates and is a very orthodox scholar. He’s in his mid to late
80s at this point.
Licona was
basically asked to leave the faculty because of some comments he made in a
debate in 2009. At this time when his book came out in 2011, he was serving on a
North American mission board for the Southern Baptist Convention. He was the
apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board. He also had
something to do with the Southern Baptist seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.
His
background was that he had a bachelor’s and master’s degree both from Liberty
University and his Ph.D. in New Testament studies from the University of
Pretoria in South Africa. When he published this book on the resurrection of
Christ and he challenges the historicity of the account of the resurrection of
the saints, it was a small bunker-buster bomb going off in evangelicalism.
It’s been
exploding more and more down through the last five years. It’s not something
you would know about or I would know about except that in the process of some
of these debates that went on about his orthodoxy, he got picked up as a
faculty member at a little school over here off the Southwest Freeway called
Houston Baptist University.
So he’s
local. I haven’t heard much about him locally but this battle going on has been
going on for a while. He used to teach at Southeastern Seminary. [Question
indistinguishable]. That’s a good question, Alan. In 1977 there was a group of
over 180 evangelical scholars who met for some time and formulated what’s called
the ICBI, the International Conference on Biblical Inerrancy which you can
google. They wrote an extensive
definition of biblical inerrancy.
This was
signed off on by many scholars across the theological denominational spectrum.
I had several faculty members when I was a student at Dallas. My first or
second year at seminary there were a number of faculty members including
Elliott Johnson who spoken at a Chafer
Conference. There was Robert Thomas who has also spoken at a Chafer
Conference. He’s also spent a lot of his career at Masters Seminary. He was
one of the signers. Norm Geisler was one of the signers.
That whole
statement, which is about seven pages, is well written. They state positively
what inerrancy is. They give all the Scripture references and they say what we
mean is “this” and we don’t mean “that”. That’s how you learn. You not only
have to state positively what you mean but you have to state negatively what
you don’t mean by it. They did a fabulous job of that.
In the
early 80s before this thing with Robert Gundry came up, the Evangelical
Theological Society, which is sort of the academic professional organization
that all college Bible professors and seminary professors and a lot of pastors
are a part of it. I’ve been a member until recently when I got fed up with some
of their stuff and I just quit.
There are
only two things in their doctrinal statement you have to affirm. One is the
Trinity. Two is the inerrancy of Scripture’s very brief statement. “We believe
the Word of God [or the Bible] is breathed out by God as inerrant in the
original writings.”
In 1981 or
1982 in order to clarify it they adopted the ICBI statement as their definition
of inerrancy. So this is what Gundry is held up against, and this is the
standard that Licona is being held up against. If you read the literature
they’re constantly going to be reciting from the ICBI to show that he has
violated the traditional standard.
This is
one of the things in that original article I read at the beginning of this
series by Wilkin is that he quotes Craig Blomberg who teaches at Denver
Seminary as saying that in today’s environment 97% of the members of ETS in
Blomberg’s opinion could not affirm what is written in the ICBI.
Looking
around this congregation, that’s what you have been taught your entire life.
That is what I have been taught my entire life. That is what was the standard
view at Dallas Theological Seminary. What Licona has done is that he not only
questions that, but he also questions the historicity of the angels at the tomb
of Jesus in Mark 16:5–7, thinking of that as possibly just legend or myth. He
questions a number of other things that are included in the resurrection
account of Jesus.
Then he
comes along and says “the account of Christ’s resurrection is accurate and the
account of Christ’s resurrection we can depend on every detail of that.” But it
runs into some other problems. The problem is that he is using what is popular
among many New Testament scholars today to one degree or another [a sliding
scale; not every one of them approaches them the same way but it’s something we
need to be aware of because they use this methodology of historical criticism].
I talked
about that last time in the introduction talking about how that affects the
understanding of Genesis 1–3. It’s a methodology which basically dehistoricizes
the text. They look at the text and something tells them that this can’t be
true so they assign it to a certain literary genre and they can say it’s not
really talking about actual literal history.
Licona
takes as his presupposition that the writers of Scripture are using the human
viewpoint standards of biography that was accepted in the culture of the
Greco-Roman world at the time. I want to also note that to a much lesser degree
professors at Dallas Seminary such as Dan Wallace, who is very good in Greek
but his theology leaks out at points but nevertheless he’s written a great
Greek grammar, and Darrel Bock who is from Houston and has been at Dallas for a
number of years use the same basic methodology.
They don’t
go as far as Licona did. They don’t go as far as Craig Blomberg but in my opinion,
they cross the line. They may not have gone very far out of bounds like these
other guys have gone further out of bounds but they’re adopting that same idea.
That is, that you can go to extra-biblical sources to establish criteria by
which you evaluate the Scripture.
I just
want to give you about eight observations of what goes on here.
First
problem which I’ve already alluded to is that the problem is using
extra-biblical literature and human viewpoint cultural norms as the standard for
evaluating divine revelation. I’ve talked about this same problem before when
you categorize literature and Scripture as apocalyptic genre.
Apocalyptic
genre isn’t actual genre but it’s in the inter-testamental literature. It’s in
the “Pseudepigrapha”. It’s not in Scripture. Scripture is prophetic literature.
I remember talking with Andy Woods when he had to take a doctoral course on
apocalyptic literature in the New Testament Department at Dallas. He was just
butting heads with the professor because he refused to accept the fact that
apocalyptic genre was legitimate.
You’re
imposing this extra-biblical standard on the Scripture and then it allows you
to do away with things that you would have some problems with and that you
don’t think are defensible. This is the standard approach, using a human
viewpoint standard to judge and evaluate the Scripture.
Second,
their basic attempt and approach is through this use of literary genre. Genre
may be an unfamiliar term to you but if you read mystery novels, a mystery
novel is a genre. It fits certain categories. You pick up an Agatha Christie
book and you know what to expect. You pick up a Nero Wolfe book and you know
what to expect. You pick up a romance novel and you know what to expect. That’s
a different genre.
You pick
up a historical novel. You read Herman Wouk, “The Winds of War” and “War and
Remembrance”. That’s an historical novel. You know what to expect. That’s a
different genre. They have different categories.
They’re
using genres as a way to re-interpret Scripture. So if they come along and say
the language in Matthew 27 is poetry and legend and it’s not meant to be
history, then they can say on the one hand, I believe it’s inerrant, but
because we have a different genre here it’s not to be taken as explaining
actual historical fact.
This is
what they do with Genesis 1–3. They say it’s an origin myth; therefore we need
to understand it that way. We believe it’s inerrant but only because it’s not
history. So they’re dehistoricizing the text.
Licona
says that this episode of resuscitation of the dead saints fits within legend.
We would say it fits the flow of the narrative. Everything surrounding it is
historical and literal. The veil is torn from top to bottom. It just goes on
about the earthquakes and the rocks were split, all of this terminology.
Third
observation is that the resurrection of the saints in this passage is directly
connected to the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is the first fruits and they are
the next, following Paul’s order given in 1 Corinthians 15:23.
The
language like we find, words like raise and resurrection in Matthew 27 are the
same words we find describing the resurrection of Jesus in the Greek in 1
Corinthians 15:23.
You open
the door to a direct assault upon the resurrection of Jesus.
Fourth
observation is that the text clearly states that these saints came out of their
tombs after Jesus’ resurrection. The tombs are open with the earthquake that
occurs at the time of the death of Christ. We’re going to hear about that.
Steve Austin is going to talk about the geology of the earthquake at the time
of the cross as evidence of the crucifixion when he’s here at the 2016
Chafer Conference. He’s going to connect some of these dots to that. So
that’s very clear.
Fifth
point, the evidence for the resurrection is the same as for Jesus’
resurrection. The tombs are opened, the text says. Matthew 27:52, “The graves are
open, the bodies of the saints were raised. They came out of their graves so
the tombs were empty and they went into Jerusalem and they appeared to many
people.”
A sixth
observation is that some of the other events are also confirmed in Mark and
Luke, including the tearing of the veil in the Temple. Even though the
resurrection of the saints is only mentioned in Matthew, the other events
surrounding it that are mentioned in Mark and Luke are also included.
Seventh
observation is that key terms are used throughout this section with an
obviously literal meaning, as intended. Earth. Quake. Temple. Veil. Rocks.
Tombs. Bodies. Asleep. All of which speak of physical realities in the New
Testament. These are not terms that are used metaphorically.
Last point
is that part of Lacuna’s argument is that this is the only place this is
mentioned so maybe it didn’t happen. Well, let me see. The account of Jesus
talking to Nicodemus is only in one place, John 3. The account of Jesus talking
to the woman at the well is only in one place in John 4. The episode of Lazarus
and the rich man and Jesus talking to Zacchaeus are only mentioned one time.
But once is enough in the Word of God.
What we
have is an attempt to do away with the infallibility of Scripture.
I want to
say some more things about historical criticism, which I talked about last
time. Just to give us a little more information about this: Historical
criticism is a product of the Enlightenment.
Remember
the Enlightenment is that period in history which starts from about 1600 and
goes to 1800. It is the reaction of the role of the church and the authority of
the church during the Middle Ages. The term Enlightenment is to boost their ego
in contrast to the Dark Ages where people were under the so-called authority of
the church and the authority of the Scripture.
It’s the
rise of rationalism and the rise of empiricism as the ultimate determiner of
truth. Rationalism is the view that unaided human reasoning could determine all
truth. That man could determine even the existence of God just by his unaided
reasoning alone. He doesn’t need revelation.
The second
was empiricism. The problem was that Descartes, who was the first thinker in
the rationalist tradition grounds, his thinking on this idea of “I think;
therefore I am.” The criticism is that he can’t get out of his own head. He
can’t get out of his head to prove the existence of anything but his own
existence. So rationalism ultimately collapses and it’s replaced by empiricism.
This is
the view that man through the use of his senses can arrive at ultimate truth.
The problem is there’s always new data. Empiricism collapsed with the critique
of David Hume in the late 1700s and out of that collapse you have the rise of
Kantian philosophy, that you can’t know truth objectively. You can only know it
as you perceive it.
This leads
to the destruction of absolute truth in modernism. It finally goes to seed. The
beginning of post-modernism is really the beginning of the early 20th
century.
Even
though historical criticism can trace its roots back into the 1600s it really
begins to flourish in the early 1800s. It’s really a misnomer. That’s what
happens. It’s the double-speak or the new-speak in George Orwell’s “1984” using
traditional language to mean something other than what it’s always meant.
We find
examples of that all the time in modern politics and in a lot of modern
theology. They talk about the resurrection of Jesus but they don’t mean what
you hear. When someone stands in the pulpit and says, “I believe Jesus rose
from the dead” they may not be talking about a physical, bodily resurrection.
I went to
a church here in Houston where the pastor gave a great Easter message but I
knew the guy was neo-orthodox and didn’t believe in a literal, physical bodily
resurrection. The people I was with said, “No, he believes in the resurrection
of Jesus.”
I said,
“You’re uneducated. He doesn’t believe in it. He’s neo-orthodox. He doesn’t
believe in the authority of Scripture or miracles or the virgin birth.” A lot
of people get taken in by this.
Historical
criticism is one of those types of words. Let’s talk about the two words there:
historical and criticism. Historical is usually taken to mean something that
occurred in space-time history. That’s what most of you mean by it. That’s what
I mean by it.
If
something is historical, it actually happened and it is verifiable through eye
witness accounts as well as documentary and other types of evidence. It refers to
something that occurred objectively in space-time history and has been observed
and reported by others.
Thus, we
know that the Bible presents real history and it purports to present eye
witness accounts in space-time history. Through the use of extra-biblical
evidence which we discover through archeology and other disciplines such as the
documents, monuments, and inscriptions that we can confirm that certain
historical events and people existed and took place.
Also,
culture norms and practices. We can look at the lifestyle presented in Genesis
12–50 in the early patriarchal period around 2000–1800 BC and we can say, “Look
at what we’ve learned through archeology about that period. The Bible describes
the cultures and norms of that time period in the Middle East.”
We can
have an affirmation of biblical validity. However, in post-modernism, knowledge
is suspect. No one can truly know anything in post-modernism. You can have your
truth and I have my truth but no one knows true truth. No one knows truth objectively.
No one
can, they say. They reject that presuppositionally before you even get started.
So in post-modernism you can’t have true, objective knowledge. Therefore, you
can’t truly know history. You can only know people’s perceptions of history.
See how
that ties back to Immanuel Kant. Let me tell you a little story about that.
There was a guy in this church a while back that was going to Dallas Seminary
seven or eight years ago. He had recorded a class that was taught on church
history. When he left the church he told me I needed to go back and listen to
those lectures by this particular professor.
The next
January I was in Kiev. I keep a lot of different theological lectures on the
iPod I was using at the time. I hooked this up to speakers. When I get up and
am making breakfast I listen to all these lectures. I had sort of spot-listened
to some of this guy’s lectures but I never started with the very first lecture.
So I’m
cooking my bacon and eggs and fixing my coffee while I’m wandering around the
apartment and listening to this lecture. It’s the first class and he’s going
through the syllabus. He’s talking about the objectives in the church history
class. He got down to about the third or fourth point and he’s explaining that
you cannot know real history as it took place. He said that you can only know
the perceptions of the people at the time but you can’t know what really
happened.
I thought
I was going to stroke out right there. I immediately went in, flipped on Skype,
sent e-mails to Charlie and to Tommy and said, “Okay, this is on my website.
You can listen to this lesson. I’ve just uploaded it. Listen between eleven
minutes in and sixteen minutes in, then give me a call on Skype.”
Ten
minutes later Tommy is calling. He was about to stroke out. John Hanna never
taught us to think about history that way. This was pure post-modernism in an
approach to the history of Christianity. That is what has subtly taken over in
the kind of thinking you find in the history departments.
That guy
is no longer at Dallas Seminary. He has gone on to other pastures. The point
I’m making is that in post-modernism you can’t have true objective knowledge.
You can’t know history as objective reality.
I have a
quote here from David Farnell from “Vital Issues in Inerrancy”. He says, “The
assumption of post-modernism is that all history is by its very nature, only a
subjective interpretation of ‘surviving traces of events.’ ”
The
assumption of post-modernism is that all history is by its very nature only a
subjective interpretation. In that view objective knowledge of historical
events is impossible.
So when
they’re talking about historical criticism, they’re not talking about objective
knowledge of history. They’re talking just about people’s subjective
impressions of what might have taken place.
Now the
word “criticism” traditionally means to apply objective criteria to documents
in order to analyze content and style for authenticity and meaning. But in
historical criticism the goal is to change the plain, normal sense of the text
to conform to an already predetermined meaning that fits the worldview and
assumptions of the critic.
It’s not
to evaluate the document. It’s to redefine and reinterpret the document. So the
historical critic’s goal is to interpret the biblical text according to the
current fads of the time.
Last week
we saw that in reference to Genesis 1–3 that the text presents itself as
space-time history but modern critics have their epistemological grid set ahead
of time by modern science.
The time
frame of modern science is what shapes their thinking. They read that into the
text and say, “This can’t be history.” They have to figure out some way to
redefine the plain meaning of the text. They do so by saying that it’s not
meant to be history. It’s meant to be figurative.
Now in the
New Testament, I just learned this late this afternoon, there’s a huge conflict
over Matthew 23. If you have your Bibles with you, you can flip back to Matthew
23. If you have one of these heretical Bibles like I have which has red letters
in it you will see how much is said by Jesus. Why is it heretical to have a
red-letter Bible? Because it’s basically saying these words of Jesus are more
accurate than everything else.
A
red-letter Bible is by definition anti-inerrancy. It’s all the words of Jesus.
It’s all the mind of Christ.
I have
this red-letter Bible and if you look at Matthew 23, Jesus says everything in
chapter 23 except the first verse. That’s the value of a red-letter Bible. You
can say, “Oh, where is Jesus talking?”
You can
say, “Here He’s talking.”
Matthew
23’s thirty-nine verses is Jesus’ final indictment of the religious system of
Israel, of their legalism, of their antagonism of grace orientation. This is
that head-on collision that occurs between Jesus and the Pharisees. There’s
this huge conflict here. Jesus just rakes the Pharisees over the coals and in
that chapter he pronounces eight “woes” over them and challenges the very core
of Pharisaical theology.
Now we’ll
get there in two or three months. I read this late this afternoon, like about
5:30 and I got alerted to this by about four lines from this article I quoted a
minute ago by Farnell.
I sent him
an e-mail actually because there was a typo and a whole sentence was left out
of a footnote. We had an interchange. I told him I was going to do Matthew 23
in a few weeks and asked, “Where are your sources here? You don’t cite anything
in this chapter for your sources.”
He said,
“Well, take a look if you have ‘The Jesus Crisis’.”
I said,
“It’s sitting right here by my desk.”
He said,
“If you have that look up pages 24 and 25 and that will give you an idea of
what’s going on in contemporary scholarship.”
Basically
what happens is in contemporary scholarship is that because of political
correctness, this kind of challenge to Judaism, to Pharisaical Judaism is
interpreted as an anti-Semitic attack. If you really believe this is what Jesus
did then in some circles this is viewed as not being politically correct and
borders on anti-Semitism.
This is a
product of post-Holocaust hermeneutics where in a Jewish community those who
are dealing with anti-Semitism want to trace the roots of Christian
anti-Semitism to the cross. I want to learn a more lot about this in the coming
weeks but we’ll get there.
This has
impacted a lot of Evangelicals. The historical criticism position is that this
is a misrepresentation of Pharisaism, that this tension actually wasn’t between
Jesus and the Pharisees in Jesus’ time, but it was between Matthew’s assumed
community he’s writing to and the Jews of Matthew’s day. How do you like that?
It was
6:35 and Farnell e-mailed me. Farnell is going to be the speaker at the Chafer
Conference in 2017. So Farnell e-mailed and told me to look at these pages. I
had them right here and I decided just to read part of this.
One of the
advocates of this position is a guy named Donald Hagner. Hagner writes this,
“It’s a tragedy that from this chapter in Matthew that the word ‘Pharisee’ has
come to mean popularly a self-righteous, hypocritical prig. Unfortunately not
even Christian scholarship over the centuries has been able to rid itself of an
unfair bias against the Pharisees.”
Basically
he’s saying this isn’t historically accurate. So what do you do with historical
criticism? You figure out a way to show that this is, by virtue of even genre
or something else, not really what Jesus said. That’s what he says.
Hagner
goes on to say, “Pharisaism was at heart, though tragically miscarried, a
movement for righteousness. This basic drive for righteousness may account for
what may be regarded as attractive and biblical, both about Pharisaic and
rabbinic Judaism. One can only marvel how radically this appraisal differs from
that of Jesus.” [According to Matthew 23, Jesus got it wrong, he says.]
And
according to Matthew 5:20 when Jesus says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the
Scribes and Pharisees you shall in no way enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Hagner
says that Jesus got it wrong. Or the Bible got it wrong. Jesus got it right but
the Bible got it wrong.
So then,
Farnell writes, “How has historical criticism managed to formulate a picture of
this group so diverse from the one painted by Jesus? Largely through assuming
that the gospel writers, particularly Matthew, took great editorial liberties
in describing the life of Christ. Matthew allegedly was writing about the
church of his day late in the 1st century.”
When did I
tell you Matthew wrote? Probably the late 40s, sixty years before many of these
guys think Matthew wrote.
So Farnell
says, “Allegedly written late in the 1st century, more than about
the actual experiences and words of Jesus. By comparing Matthew with his
source, Mark, one can reputedly see how Matthew’s embellishments were intended
to make the Pharisees look so bad. The cause of these embellishments is
traceable to the presumed tension that existed between Matthew’s community and
a noticeable Jewish presence in which Matthew wrote his gospel.”
I won’t
read anymore but that just gives you an idea of what’s going on in scholarly
circles today. Some of these guys have some good things to say in their
commentaries and I have to wade through this garbage. Every now and then they
bring up some good historical, grammatical points and things like that.
To wrap
this up, I want to look at a couple of alleged contradictions in the last five
or six minutes. These are pretty easy. I don’t expect you to remember all of
these things. Some of you will study and remember them and make good notes in
your Bible, which you should, so you can go back to them if you need to.
What I’ve
learned over the years is that when I’ve heard someone defend Christianity or
defend against this claim of contradictions, and then I hear someone attack it,
I may not be able to bring up the answer at that particular time but I remember
that I heard it.
It’s like
when I was in college and I would hear things about evolution, I could say, “I
don’t know what the answer to that particular situation is but I know I’ve
heard it. I know there’s an answer. Just because I can’t bring it up from the
memory bank right now doesn’t mean there’s not an answer.” It helps to
frontload you on what these issues are.
One claim
is that there’s a contradiction between Matthew 10:9–10 where Jesus is giving
instruction to His disciples as they’re going out to take the gospel of the
kingdom to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, and Mark 6:8, which is
talking about the same event.
In Matthew
10:9–10 Jesus says not to take gold or silver or copper in your money belts.
Don’t take a bag for your journey nor two tunics, nor sandals, nor staffs; for
a worker is worthy of his food.
If you
think about it Jesus is not telling them not to take sandals. They’re going to
wear the pair they have. He’s telling them not to take extras. When He says not
to take two tunics, He’s not saying to go naked. He’s saying don’t take extras.
Don’t take anything with you. You’re going to wear the tunic you have on.
You’re going to wear the sandals you have on but don’t take an extra staff
either. You’ll take the one you have.
In Mark
6:8 then we’re told, “He commanded them to take nothing for the journey except a staff …”
People will say that in Matthew He says not to take a staff and in Mark He says
to take a staff. See, they say, He’s contradictory. No, if you understand what
He is saying He’s telling them not to take extra stuff in Matthew. Mark is just
summarizing it and telling them not to take anything more than their one staff,
their one walking stick.
This is
one that gets brought up. In fact, I mentioned William Craig earlier. He brings
this up saying that Jesus got it wrong in Matthew 13:32. This is botanically
incorrect. Jesus says in Matthew 13:32 regarding the mustard seed, “This is the least
of all the seeds, but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes
a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.”
The complaint
here is that this is a factually erroneous statement because the mustard seed
is not the smallest of all seeds. Before we jump to that conclusion, remember
Jesus says this. He’s talking about this. If He spoke a lie; if He’s lying
about it, how could He be sinless?
This isn’t
just some small factual discrepancy. This goes to the integrity of the gospels.
What can we trust? What can we not trust? Can we trust Jesus to say that which
is actually true?
How do we
understand this? There are a couple of ways in which this has been handled
which is legitimate. One of them is in an older work published back in the late
19th century by R.C. Trench called “Notes on the Parables of Our
Lord”. In that he says, “This seed, when cast into the ground, is ‘the least of
all seeds,’—words which have often perplexed interpreters, many seeds, as of
poppy or rue, being smaller. Yet difficulties of this kind are not worth
making; it is sufficient to know that ‘small as a grain of mustard seed’ was a
proverbial expression among the Jews for something exceedingly minute (see Luke
17:6). The Lord in His popular teaching adhered to the popular language
[idiom].” That’s one possibility.
I think
the Greek grammar is a better answer because in the Greek the least is this
word MICROS which is an
adjective. See this little word here [on the slide], “comp”? That is a
comparative. It is the smaller of the seeds. It is not a superlative. It does
not say that it is the smallest. He’s not making an absolute statement here.
He’s making a comparative that compared to these other seeds, it’s the smaller.
He’s not making an absolute statement. Grammatically He’s not claiming that
when you compare to all seeds that exist on the earth, it’s the smallest. That
is not what He says grammatically.
Ryrie puts
it this way, “Another fact to note is that the word smallest is actually a
comparative not a superlative, and should be translated (as in the “New
American Standard Bible” and “New English Bible”), ‘smaller of all the seeds.’
In other words, the Lord did not state an absolute (the mustard seed is
absolutely the smallest), but placed the mustard seed in the class of smallest
seeds.”
What
appears to be a contradiction on the surface actually isn’t.
Then we
have one last example which is one related to the blind man at Jericho. I’m
going to show you the different accounts: Matthew 20:29–34 recounting Jesus.
We’ll get there in a couple of weeks. “As they went out of Jericho, a great multitude
followed Him. And behold two blind men sitting by the road, when they heard
that Jesus was passing by, cried out, saying ‘Have mercy on us, O Lord, Son of
David!’ ” We’ll just look at those first two verses.
What do we
see? The statement is that when they went out of Jericho they run into two
blind men. That’s Matthew’s account.
Now Mark’s
account says, “Now
they came to Jericho. As He went out of Jericho with His disciples [Mark
agrees with Matthew that He’s coming out of Jericho] and a great multitude, blind Bartimaeus, the
son of Timaeus, sat by the road begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus of
Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’
”
He’s only
got one blind guy there, Bartimaeus. What’s the solution? Mark is just talking
about one of the two blind men. He’s going to record what happened in relation
to Bartimaeus. He’s not saying there was only one there. He is only talking
about one of them. So there’s not a contradiction.
The other
thing is as both Matthew and Mark say that Jesus is coming out of Jericho, but
in Luke it says it happened near Jericho. He is approaching Jericho when a
certain blind man sat by the road begging. So how do we resolve what appears to
be a major contradiction here?
One is
that the men were pleading with the Lord as He entered Jericho but they weren’t
healed until He left. That’s one solution that’s offered.
The one I
think more likely is that there were two Jerichos. There’s the ruins of the old
city and then there was the new city that was there at the time of Christ. It
wasn’t built on top of the tel. If you’ve been to Israel with me you’ve been to
that tel in Jericho.
Jesus
could have been coming out of the old Jericho on His way to the new Jericho.
That’s another very plausible suggestion as to how this is explained. They are
writing from different perspectives.
I put one
more in just for fun. This one is always brought up that Luke got it wrong.
Luke 2:2 identifies the census that was called for by Caesar Augustus at the
time of the birth of Christ was taking place while Quirinius was governing
Syria. The only Quirinius we know of in history was Quirinius who was the
legate in Syria who began to reign in AD 6, probably ten years after Jesus was born.
However,
Quirinius is not a strange name. It’s not an unusual name. There were a number
of people named Quirinius and there is some evidence that there was another
Quirinius who was in the area of Syria serving in the bureaucracy ten years
earlier than this.
Just because
we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean there’s not an answer. For many years
critics insisted the Bible was wrong. That there existed no such people as the
Hittites and that was used as a fulcrum to attack the Bible. Then in 1927 we
discovered the existence of the Hittite capital of Hattusa in Turkey and all
the critics had to eat crow.
Just
because we don’t know an answer for what appears to be a contradiction doesn’t
mean there isn’t an answer. Numerous contradictions have been pointed out over
the years. Yet when we get enough information we find that the Bible is always
substantiated.
Nothing
has been found to disprove the Bible. There are always answers to these alleged
discrepancies. We can have great confidence in the Bible as the inerrant,
infallible Word of God, breathed out by God for us. We’ll come back to this
topic several more times in the coming months because there’s just so much
going on. I just don’t have time to read through the tomes. The two books that
Farnell and Geisler have edited are the size of small yellow pages, if you can
remember what that looked like.
Or the old
“Biblia Hebraica” that was just huge. Six hundred, 700, 800, 900 pages and it
is impossible to digest two 900-page books in four weeks. I can’t do it. Some
of you think I can but I can’t do that. I can only leap small buildings, not
tall buildings. It takes more than one bound.
Closing
Prayer
Father,
thank You for this time that we’ve had together to study through the doctrine
of inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy to have our faith strengthened by
an accurate understanding of Your Word.
Thank You
that You have revealed Yourself to us that we can know You and that we can know
things truly even though we may not know them exhaustively.
Father, we
pray that our confidence in You will be strengthened from the study and our
confidence in Your Word will be strengthened. We know that we can rely upon it,
no matter what the circumstances. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.